Wednesday, September 05, 2012

won't you take me to...

yay! a finished bee quilt. thanks so much to the ladies of the wonky quilt bee for making so many awesome blocks. i improv pieced the blocks together with various light colored leftovers. i added essex linen borders with little squares of a beige windham hand-dyed solid in the corners.
the back uses lizzy house hedgehog fabric (my city has quite the pest problem) and a brown connecting threads solid with a little pezzy print and some more neutral scraps thrown in. the batting is quilter's dream cotton.
quilting this turned out to be a huge pain in the ass. i knew i wanted to leave the houses un-quilted. i used a stipple on the negative space because i thought it would go fast. i was attempting to try out superior so fine thread. it would not stop shredding and breaking every few inches. finally i gave up and switched to gutermann cotton thread in the top and kept the so fine in the bobbin and it quilted much more smoothly after that. i haven't sworn off poly thread for quilting completely yet but i am very close to it.
i went with a scrappy binding, which might be my favorite part of the whole thing. it's handstitched to the front. of course i forgot to measure it but it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 44x50. it got a very nice reception at the baby shower and several people thought it looked "just as good as store-bought." so i got that going for me.